Throughout history, the visibility of airborne objects from the ground has made for a spectacle of flight, with sizeable crowds gathering for eighteenth-century balloon launches and early twentieth-century air shows. Taking to the Air tells the history of flight through the eye of the spectator, and later, the passenger.
The London Underground is the oldest, most sprawling and illogical metropolitan transport system in the world, the result of a series of botch-jobs and improvisations. Yet it transports over one billion passengers every year - and this figure is rising. The author embarks on a social history of London's underground railway system.